Herbert McCabe taught in many ways, not least per viam provocationis. One day in the mid 1970s he provoked something far beyond his intentions with a throwaway remark about Summa theologiae I, q. 15, the question on ‘ideas’. ‘It must have been written by Saint Thomas on a platonic off day’, he declared, a comment that remained with the present writer to stimulate research in directions that might not have overly pleased Herbert. ‘Platonic’ and ‘platonist’ were not usually good words in his vocabulary, profoundly impressed as he was by Thomas’s achievement in developing Christian theology in radically new ways using the works of Aristotle, Plato’s brightest student and critic.

Thomas Aquinas himself, though, at the midpoint of his career, was convinced that the Platonists, in what they had to say about the first principle of things, were exactly right (verissima) and completely in harmony with Christian faith ‘. In fact, in a brief but potent contribution to the 1974 Thomistic Congress for the seventh centenary of Saint Thomas’s death, Andre von Ivanka asserted that as regards ‘good’, and because of the ontology supporting his understanding of it, Thomas not only ‘platonises’ but formally contradicts Aristotle. Where Aristotle argues that ‘good is not a general term corresponding to a single idea’ (.Nicomachean Ethics 1.6, 1096b25) Thomas says that ‘all things, in seeking their proper perfections, seek God himself, insofar as the perfections of all things are reflections (similitudines) of the divine being’ (Summa Theologiae I 6, 1 ad 2). Elsewhere Thomas says that ‘all things seek, as their ultimate end, to be united with God’ (Summa Contra Gentiles III. 19).

The word paradise is one which is so familiar to most of us that its utterance evokes an immediate mental image of a beautiful garden where the righteous dwell for eternity. This image, while finding its roots in the biblical tradition, is influenced as much by Dante, Milton and many Christian paintings as it is by biblical traditions. In fact, it is hard to see the word paradise without bringing to mind those famous medieval and renaissance paintings of the Garden of Eden, Heaven and Hell. The problem of this Christian heritage is that it encourages a rather monochrome image of the nature of Paradise which runs contrary to the variety of images contained in texts from the biblical era.

The purpose of this study is to examine the references to Paradise in texts from the biblical era and to explore the images evoked by them. The paper will begin and end with a consideration of the texts about Paradise in the New Testament. From there we shall move on to explore the background to these texts first in the Hebrew bible and the Septuagint and then in non-canonical texts from the second temple period. We shall note where ideas shift and develop and note how this affects the image of Paradise. We will end by returning to the texts from the New Testament and noting how this background affects our understanding of the relevant passages.

It is impossible to evaluate Sen’s thought in terms of pure economics, because his humanism takes his thought into other domains, including philosophy, political theory, sociology and demography.

Born in 1933 into a Hindu academic family in Dhaka, before it became the capital of Bangladesh, he studied at the universities of Calcutta and Cambridge, before teaching in Indian and American Universities, and then at Oxford, before returning to Cambridge on being elected Master of Trinity College. This factual curriculum vitae gives little indication of his taking, from the beginning, a standpoint by which he was perfectly at home in all these settings, creative and judicious in every sphere he entered. In his considerable list of puuheauons, some or modest iength, others originally papers or lectures being quite short, and in innumerable articles, one is conscious of a mind which searches out the roots of questions and their interconnections, expressing them in limpid English prose. Sensitive, though not always formally so, to the philosophical dimensions of the material, the resultant thought has a sapiential quality, in which it approximates, for example, to that of the late Belgium Louvain economist, Fernand Baudhuin. One thinks especially of the latter’s Déontologie des Affaires (Louvain 1960). The latter’s range was primarily Western Europe, with extensions mainly into more Eastern Europe and the United States; Sen’s range is world-wide, equally at home in the problems of developing India, of famine-struck Africa, as with those of Western Europe, North America and Asia. He often uses the human factors which accompany the rise of the post-war Japanese economy as a yard-stick to measure the problems of the aging economies of the older industrialised nations.

A bridging-passage in a piece of music can have several roles. One of them is to make us wish that we might fully appreciate the effect of the music’s ending when it comes. Able to hear the separate musical messages converge. In her great work The Dialogue, a complex meditation, Catherine of Siena speaks of ‘the lovely and glorious bridge’ of Jesus’ presence as having a similar role. Although ‘he was no longer with you’—and here, adding her own reflection to scripture, she adopts a voice as God’s own—‘his teaching remained.’ The reader is addressed as one of the disciples who, on the day of the Ascension, were ‘as good as dead, because their hearts had been lifted up to heaven.’ The bridge himself has ascended, and we, the reader-followers, must ask, ‘Where can I find the way?’ As we shall see, Catherine expects her metaphor of a bridge to play many parts in the dramatic speech patterns of conversion. It can stand for the reliable relationship we have with Christ through all our own difficulties. But it stands also for our vantage point of calmly casting nets to help others in trouble. Theological discourse has not often called on one symbol to be so versatile, although the image of each stone which contributes to a tower in The Shepherd of Hermas is similarly polyvalent. A recent translator of The Dialogue, Suzanne Noffke, suggests that Catherine may have had in mind the kind of walled bridge which was built over the Arno, containing shops. This was a route allowing concealment but could also mean sudden surprise for the traveller herself. It might indicate a suitable direction to evade severe pressures.

The thought of paradise has exercised a particular hold upon the ethical imagination. Bringing us before those things that lie just outside of our reach, its language speaks to us of what has been there all along, before ever we appeared to take up our places in the world, and of what will still be there ever after we have gone from here. Paradise speaks to us of this enduring somewhere else than here, and so we are drawn to its lasting otherness, held in fascination by its suggestion that things might have been otherwise, and might still come to be so—if only. Ethics has been shaped within this ‘if only’, the cue for its opening lines taken from the lead of paradise that it is our truest beginning, and its action directed by a promise that all will end well. So the thought of paradise enables the self-understanding of ethics as an interim measure, fit for the time between times, living from out of a perfect beginning and facing towards the horizon at which the sun will rise again. Paradise thus discloses the world for ethics, illuminating the world as a place of change, and at the same time a place of failure and of loss, and so it gives an ever-available ground for ethics, sending it forth to do what work it can in the time given, and shaping the activity of ethics as the careful observance and restoration of what comes to be known there.

Elizabeth Jennings, who died in 2001 was ‘the most unconditionally loved poet of (her) generation,’ according to Michael Schmidt writing in the preface to her New Collected Poems’ This seems a slightly less generous accolade when Schmidt goes on to say that the other poets of her generation included Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, not themselves obviously loveable poets. One imagines that Larkin might have been rather disappointed to have discovered, posthumously, that he was unconditionally loved, whereas Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry seems to invite just this response. Indeed, so different is the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings to that of Amis and Larkin it is hard to imagine how she can ever have been seriously associated with them in the minds of critics. Whether The Movement ever existed at all has been much debated, but the mature Elizabeth Jennings that we find in New Collected Poems shows what a different trajectory she had followed from that of her laconic and wry contemporaries.

New Collected Poems begins, like her Collected Poems and Selected Poems with a dozen poems from her first collected volume of poetry (entitled tentatively Poems). First and second are ‘Delay’ and ‘Winter Love’ which seem to set the tone of everything which comes after. They are short poems — the first consisting of two quatrains, the second of a sestet, almost two halves of a divided sonnet — which address two recurrent themes of Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry: love and time, more particularly the way in which the test of love is the test of time.

When we theologians interpret the great teachings of traditional Christianity — the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the two natures of Christ, for example — it often appears that our task is a very difficult one. What I mean is that when we think about the three-in-oneness of God we tend to presuppose that this three-in-oneness is a mathematical absurdity, and when we think about the two natures of Christ we almost instinctively presuppose that we are thinking about a self-contradictory nonsense. This is because whereas it is normal to say that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, we seem to be saying something that contradicts this when we say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are God. Absurdly, we insist that ‘these three are one’. And whereas we know that squares cannot be circles, we seem to be saying something like this when we say that Jesus Christ is simultaneously God and man. Such doctrines confront us as difficult riddles that need to be solved, problems that need to be cracked. We presuppose that Christian doctrine is, in one sense or another, intellectually outrageous; we think that it is essentially paradoxical, and we think that it provides a challenge to human reason. And because theology spends its time dealing with confusing and bewildering paradoxes it seems appropriate that theology itself is understood to be something that is very difficult to do.

The trouble with post-modern theology is that it tends to be pre-Barthian. Indeed, two main strands of English theology that have attempted to write from a postmodern perspective—the ‘Sea of Faith’ school surrounding Don Cupitt, and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school surrounding John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock— share very little else but their postmodernism and different kinds of pre-Barthianism. I suspect the arguments of this article could be applied equally to the American ‘post-liberal’ school surrounding George Lindbeck, but space forbids treatment of too many variants.

Modernism then represents faith in three things:

1. 1 Deductivism: the idea that all meaningful language forms a single deductive system, wherein the truth value of any proposition can be calculated;

2. 1 Foundationalism: the idea that this system can be securely based on universally accepted premises

3. 1 Correspondence theory: the idea that statements exist to express truth, which consists in the correspondence between what they assert and what is the case.

Modernism hopes one day to get at a text that is consistent with itself, demonstrable to all reasonable people, and adequate to the world. Of course, there is a lot out there in the world that is currently ‘outside the text’, but one day we will expand the text to fit the world exactly, like a glove.

Had I been asked back in the 1950’s about the origins of ministry in the church, I should (being, in theological terms, a rather precocious teenager) have had a ready answer. The Lord had appointed apostles, answerable to Peter, who in turn had transmitted their authority to bishops, presbyters and deacons, all subject to Peter’s successors, the bishops of Rome. (If pressed, I might have acknowledged that it was possible that presbyters and bishops were originally indistinguishable, and that the threefold ministry may have developed from an earlier twofold ministry.) Had not Clement of Rome shortly before the end of the first century spoken of the line of successors running from Christ to the apostles and then to those that they in turn appointed (1 Clement 42; 44)? The inspired author of Acts had testified that it was the practice of Paul and Barnabas to appoint presbyters in every city (Acts 14:23), and Paul in the Pastoral letters had indicated that the means of designation was the laying-on of hands (1 Tim. 4:14, 5:22; 2 Tim. 1:6). The primacy of Peter was evident from Matt. 16:13-20; the intervention in the 90’s by Clement bishop of Rome in the affairs of the Corinthian church reflected the fact that Rome was already then exercising the primacy bestowed on Peter. A decade ago, Fr Aidan Nichols gave an account of the origins of ministry which has much in common with this one, but most of us now think that the way in which things came about was much more complex than that. Let us review the evidence in chronological order.

The most famous book that talks to us of precisely “human” happiness, the proper happiness of man in so far as he is man in this world, is, no doubt, Aristotle’s Ethics. Here he tells us, as if looking into our own souls in our own time, that everything we do, all the particular, singular things in which our actions exist and which constitute the outlines of our lives, we do because we seek to be happy by the doing of these actions. This seeking to be happy in each particular act is what unites all the things that do exist in so far as they are touched by human minds and hands. All human beings reveal the same curious variety of longings in their origins. The world, in other words, is full of things that came to be because someone sought to be happy and did something to attain this purpose, albeit not always the right thing or the best thing..

Aristotle next explains to us that we can have differing ideas of that in which this happiness consists, but even here, the general diversity is not so great when we come to examine it. The great variations that seem at first sight evident in human searchings can be subsumed under four general headings. Some think that happiness is money, some pleasure, some honour or power, and still others think it consists in human contemplation of truth, of knowing the things that are. Happiness, Aristotle tells us; is an activity, it is an activity of our highest faculties on the highest objects

In a book on Aquinas and beauty, Fr Armand Maurer starts with an apology. For, so he notes, ‘we look in vain in the immense body of Aquinas’s writings for a detailed and comprehensive treatment of beauty’. In general, says Maurer, ‘Thomas seems to have given short shrift to beauty or to have avoided it altogether’. And I might say something similar when it comes to Aquinas and the academic life. In his writings, the word ‘academic’ occurs in two allusions to St Augustine’s Contra Academicos. Otherwise, it is not to be found at all whether as a noun or as an adjective. There is a common 16th and 17th century English use of ‘academic’ according to which someone academic is a disciple of Plato. But Aquinas is heavily critical of Plato. And he has no treatise on the nature and purpose of centers of higher learning and the like. No work of his remotely corresponds to studies such as Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University.

I might add that some famous academics have been throughly skeptical of Aquinas’s own academic value. He is often presented as an important philosopher. But was he? Not, for example, according to Bertrand Russell. As Russell himself put it: ‘There is little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead ...

One hundred and fifty years ago this Spring, John Henry Newman gave a series of lectures that eventually became the collection of those lectures and other occasional essays we know as The Idea of a University. Newman was a nineteenth century English thinker who became modernity’s most famous Catholic convert. He was born at the beginning of the century (1801), died at the end (1890), and converted from the Church of England at mid-century (1845), just seven years before he gave the lectures that concern us. He gave the lectures that formed the basis of his book because an Irish bishop asked him to, as part of an effort to establish a new Catholic University of Ireland. Newman gave the talks, re-wrote them, combined them with other essays he wrote during the 1 850s and published them as The Idea of a University in 1873. The university no longer exists. His book does exist, but (as the essays that accompany the abridged 1996 Yale edition suggest), there is little agreement about whether it points us backward or forward—where “us” includes students and faculty but also university administrators and university labourers and even donors.

One of the curious features of this classic work on Catholic education is that Newman makes little explicit reference to the religious orders who were the founders of most Catholic colleges and universities—Benedictine or Augustinian, Dominican or Franciscan, Notre Dame or Jesuit. Yet, as I hope to show, these orders were clearly in the back of Newman’s mind in ways that shed light on the argument of The Idea as well as on our own circumstances.

In one region of our lives, we have no problem in understanding how a thing can change its substance while apparently remaining itself. The process is known as metaphor. ‘Fire’ can mean anger or amorousness rather than literal flame, but the word ‘fire’ remains unaltered in this exchange, rather as the bread and wine of the eucharist still look and behave like bread and wine. Since the meaning of a word is its being, we can say that the being or ‘substance’ of the word has changed with this metaphorical transaction. Flame has transubstantiated into fury.

Moreover, ‘fire’ can act as a metaphor of passion only because there are real resemblances between the two. The relation between the two signs is not iconic (they don’t look much like each other), but it is not arbitrary either. Maybe Seamus Heaney could get ‘carburetter’ to mean erotic passion, but for most of us ‘fire’ is a less laborious way of doing it. In a similar way, the bread and wine of the eucharist, as signs of our human solidarity which need to be destroyed (consumed) if they are to yield life, have natural affinities with the body of Christ. As Herbert McCabe once remarked, you couldn’t consecrate Coke and burgers because they aren’t food and drink.

The notion of metaphor will only get us so far in understanding the eucharist, since a change of being which leaves a thing apparently intact is more mysterious than a change of meaning which does so. But a semiotics of the eucharist can be pressed further.

James Cone begins his book about The Spirituals and Blues by defining this music as ‘the power of song in the struggle for black survival’. The quality of spirituals and blues is ‘an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength’. The use of human life at its roughest as a source of power is also the meaning of comedy. Comedy is not just a funny ha-ha plot, it is a milieu. It is a milieu over which love presides. Speaking about the earthiness of the blues, Cone observes, ‘People cannot love physically and spiritually ... until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.’ The painful, raw sounds of the blues and the spirituals venture further into the comic milieu than do Hollywood romantic ‘comedies.’

Richie Havens used to sing a spiritual called ‘Motherless Child’

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home.

Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home.

Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,
Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,
Sometimes I feel like a feather in the air,
And I spread my wings and I fly,

I spread my wings and I fly.

Elaine Scarry’s text The Body in Pain offers an analysis of the human experiences of suffering and pain as effects of divine and human making and remaking. Assuming a Feuerbachian analysis of the human projection of the divine, she maintains that God is the primal human Artefact who, once made, remakes the human subject in his own image through wounding and healing. That which distinguishes the human from the divine is embodiment. Embodied as they are, human beings can be wounded. God, being bodiless, cannot be wounded.

Scarry’s thesis relies overwhelmingly on a Western notion of human work that she believes has been passed into our culture through two dominant sets of religious and politico-economic discourses, for her those of Judeo-Christianity and of Marxism. These discourses have been so influential in the formation of western subjectivity that they reveal much, she holds, about the way Western subjects are constructed by discourses of pain and illness. It is this aspect of Scarry’s monumental work that interests me, and which I will initially use to read the text of the 13th century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis, before moving on to a consideration of her medieval contemporaries Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg. In reading Christina’s text, the problem I will pose is how her performance of wounding and healing assist in constructing/reconstructing herself as a mystical subject. Secondly I will ask the question, what theological and literary purpose does the language of wounding and healing serve in the medieval texts of the Beguines Hadewijch and Mechthild? In other words, what does the text produce?

At the heart of Christian belief is a gift: the ‘free gift of God. . . in Jesus Christ our Lord’. The language of gift is peppered through the New Testament and constitutes one of its most distinctive features. It portrays an abundant and generous God who acts out of love, without expecting return, and whose generosity in no wise depends on our activity. Traditionally, this utter gratuitousness of God’s gifts has been cited and defended in connection with the doctrine of divine sovereignty: God’s gifts must be offered without expectation of any return, because to claim otherwise would be to imply that God desires something, and so lacks it in the first place.

However, this affirmation is in some tension with another: that at the heart of Christian life is a response, in the worship and works of God’s people. While the image of a needy God is alien to Christian understanding, it is equally alien to the Christian understanding to postulate a God who does not want or intend a responsive movement from God’s people. Herein lies a dilemma for Christian theology: how to hold together such an exalted view of the necessary freedom and unconditionality of God’s gift with the maintenance of human responsibility and so capacity to respond?

So Christians must at one and the same time preach that God gives freely; and that to love God is necessarily to serve God. This tension is a familiar and perennial one, beginning with the faith-versus-works controversy of the New Testament itself, and re-emerging regularly throughout Christian history.

Soon after the Second Vatican Council it became customary in our churches for celebrant and people to face one another during the Eucharist, whereas previously it had been more usual for everybody to face in the same direction. Considerable sums of money were spent in facilitating this arrangement, which was widely thought to be among the chief requirements of the ‘new liturgy’. For many, ‘mass facing the people’ has become, together with the use of the vernacular, the sine qua non of contemporary liturgy. Many priests will refuse to celebrate otherwise, many laity would not attend a mass celebrated otherwise. The reasons are surely ecclesiological: the reorientation of priest and people at the liturgy is seen as symbolic of the move from a pyramidal to a collegial model of church that the Second Vatican Council effected.

Before the Council, for celebrant and people to face each other was a clear sign of affiliation to the liturgical movement. The pattern was rare in this country, especially among Catholics. An early example was the chapel of Queen’s College in Birmingham, built in 1938 but only opened for worship after the Second World War. At Queens the celebrant of the eucharist has always stood in the apse, facing the body of the church, and in doing so has faced west I have been told that Queen’s College chapel was the first built in England for the ‘westward position’, under the influence of the liturgical movement.

The change was represented as a return to primitive practice, but this justification was based on a misunderstanding.

I am convinced that many reject this aspect of Christianity because it is misunderstood. Thus I would like to present it in a way that may bring its meaning to light. Many contemporary exegetes and Catholic theologians have renounced the ‘high Christology’ which underpins the doctrine of Redemption. However, if one purifies it of certain unfortunate interpretations acquired in modern times, the classic soteriology maintained by Catholicism may turn out to provide the best account of the Christian experience of salvation. Insights into this Catholic conception can also aid interreligious dialogue.

It has been remarked that the Israelis have a ‘slightly morbid fascination with things Roman Catholic, especially in relation to the Holy See’. Until 1993 a meeting between the Pope and the Grand Rabbi of Israel was vetoed because the leader of Catholicism was regarded as a ‘source of impurity’. Since Israel is the focus of one of the most combustible problems in the world, it is important to understand every filament of that beleaguered nation’s anxieties, one of which is its anxiety about Catholics. Well-known is its concern about the Church’s role during the Nazi era, and its historic contempt for Jewry. Perhaps less familiar is Israel’s anxiety about the Church’s supposed historic antipathy towards Zionism and the State of Israel. Such amorphous perceptions are the stuff of the Middle Eastern scene, which is a mirage built on sand, an ocean of propaganda, designed to conceal the drive for domination. Are there any grounds for Israeli suspicions that the Church has looked for a greater role in Israel/ Palestine without announcing it, and that it has been hostile to and worked to undermine Israel? Church policy towards Israel can always be presented by the Vatican in terms of true Christian concern; but the question here is: what do Jews see, and how do they see it?